Peta Credlin: If we can’t defend our values, how do we defend our country?

Despite Australia’s troop withdrawal from Afghanistan it does not mean we can assume that great power conflict is a thing of the past but do we still have what it takes to defend our values, asks Peta Credlin?

The announcement on Thursday that Australia’s longest war is finally over — with the last troops home from Afghanistan by mid-year — is naturally welcome.

No one wants to see our armed forces in harm’s way ad infinitum, and no one wants the expense of overseas military deployments; but that doesn’t mean that they’re not sometimes absolutely necessary for our country’s safety.

Of course, the families of the 41 Australians killed in this conflict will forever be scarred by their loss; and from the PM down we feel for them, even though premature bereavement is potentially the lot of every military family; a debt we can never adequately repay.

Because Afghanistan now faces a very uncertain future, and could easily revert to Taliban rule; or worse, fall into a vicious civil war between the Taliban and al Qaeda, many will say that the whole Afghan enterprise was a miserable failure. But sometimes, there are no good options, and the challenge is to find the least bad alternative.

After the September 11 atrocity, the US and its allies really had no choice. They had to strike against the al Qaeda training bases and sanctuaries in Afghanistan. And once the Taliban had been removed, they probably had to try to build a better government — if not a liberal democracy, at least one that did not wreak genocide on its own people nor permit terrorism against ours.  

The last of Australia’s troops in Afghanistan will come home mid-year.

And given Saddam Hussein’s consistent sponsorship for Islamist terrorism, and defiance of UN resolutions, there was a strong case for the invasion of Iraq and his removal; the pity is that so little thought had been given to what came next.

The desire of two US presidents, Donald Trump and now Joe Biden, to end the “forever wars” entirely reflects our reluctance to put our military at risk and our absolutely-right-yearning to spare anyone the horrors of war and premature death.  

But can we count on always being free of the dreadful challenges that our grandparents and great grandparents routinely had to face?

Much as we’d all wish it otherwise, I’m not sure. Equally, I’m not so sure how we’d cope, as a nation, with the need for sacrifice on a large scale, given our safety-first mindset, lately reinforced by the pandemic. It’s worth remembering, that from a population of just over five million, Australia lost 60,000 in the Great War, including 1500 in a single night at the Battle of Fromelles. In my own family, my great-grandfather and five of his brothers fought overseas, predominantly on the Western Front.

From a population of just over seven million, we lost 40,000 in World War II; my grandpa was wounded in New Guinea. As a nation, we lost nearly 400 in Korea and nearly 600 in Vietnam. Not dead of natural causes – but killed, due to combat.

Peta Credlin.

“Never again” is always our instinctive response. Yet what if the threat to our way of life and our freedoms comes for us again?

We certainly can’t assume that the threat of Islamist terrorism has gone forever, just because the sacrifice of military lives, in faraway places, has largely kept it at bay for two decades as recent attacks in Europe, particularly France, have shown.

And we can’t assume that great power conflict is a thing of the past.

Almost every day, China is rattling its sabre against Taiwan, now a vibrant democracy of 25 million people, effectively independent, who have every right to resist forcible incorporation into a brutal dictatorship, just because it claims them. America is tired of being the world’s policeman — and who can blame them — but America is all that stands between the people of Taiwan and their subjugation into China.

What if America summons us for aid, as Britain did long ago to help defend Poland?

Do we have our forebears’ strength and stoicism; how would we cope if our country ever found itself in a major war?

Let’s hope we never have to find out.

But you have to wonder, given our modern nervousness about free speech, lest it offend anyone; and readiness to throw people to the wolves, reputationally at least, in this age of ‘cancel culture’, and social media hate, if we would even have what it takes to defend what so many have died to defend in the past?

The reaction to Prince Philip’s death shows that lives of duty can still be respected. Picture: Carl de Souza/AFP

Just how strong is our national character these days?

One encouraging sign was the reaction to the death of Prince Philip: suggesting that lives of duty and service can still be recognised and appreciated. Taking risks, enduring pain (emotional and physical), and selflessness are not traits associated with generation snowflake. But in Philip, the embodiment of the wartime generation, they are still capable of striking a chord of admiration, it seems, along with sympathy for the Queen in her bereavement.

Perhaps, after all, Meghan Markle and her indulgent emoting and victimhood, might not be quite so emblematic of the modern world. Let’s hope so, because I can’t imagine a future without any need for strong men (yes, and I mean men; prepared to deploy lethal force in combat) and people of character.

We think the pandemic has tested us, and it has.

But compared to what those who’ve come before us have faced, we have fared well. What worries me is the prospect of more severe tests coming our way and my fear that we’re just not the sort of people we once were.

I hope I’m wrong, but if we’re slow to defend our values, like free speech and the rule of law, how can we defend our country?

Magda muck queues keyboard cabal

If you’re not on Twitter you would have missed it, but there was a tsunami of vicious bile against Jenny Morrison this week, prompted by the PM posting on social media a picture of his wife standing by him as he signed the Prince Philip condolence book; and another image of him and the Governor-General standing by her while she signed.

You’d think both Scott and Jenny Morrison separately signing the condolence book would have been taken as a sign that she can speak for herself — and that they are a partnership.

But no. Magda Szubanski might have been the most prominent of those who joined the pile-on but there were literally hundreds of lefty keyboard warriors smearing Mrs Morrison … and for what?

In the end, merely for being married to a prime minister who happens to be a social conservative and openly a churchgoing Christian.

It’s no accident that Szubanski referenced the Handmaid’s Tale in her attack; as the left regards this fantasy of religious extremists taking over America as a secular parable for our times.

Instead of doing the decent thing and apologising, Szubanski hit the airwaves claiming, implausibly, that she hadn’t recognised Mrs Morrison and wasn’t “having a crack at her appearance”.  

She did admit, though, that she was drawing attention to “far right” Christians. ‘Far Right’?

As if Morrison is somehow a beyond-the-pale extremist simply because he admits that faith is an integral part of who he is? Or was it the usual elitist spite directed at stay-at-home mums like Jenny that sparked Szubanski’s outrage?

Whatever it was, I suspect this will be a feature of the social media campaign run by lefties as we get closer to the federal election.

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, Weeknights at 6pm

Originally published as Peta Credlin: If we can’t defend our values, how do we defend our country?